SHENZHEN, China – In 1980, the year Deng Xiaoping established Shenzhen as China’s first special economic zone, opening its mercantile sectors to market capitalism and free trade principles, an attractive, tree-shaded commercial district known as Dongmen was home to 30,000 residents near the center of a metropolitan region of 300,000.

Thirty-five years later, Dongmen is a crowded commercial neighborhood of 300,000 residents at the edge of a metropolitan region of 18 million, China’s fourth largest.

As part of the Wilson Center and Circle of Blue’s Global Choke Point project, Choke Point: Port Cities will examine how Oakland, California, and Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, are responding to interlinked water, energy, and pollution challenges. These multimedia reports are meant to inform exchanges and convenings in 2016 to share among leaders of both cities and others like them around the Pacific Rim.

Although treating wastewater generally ranks alongside police and fire safety, schools, and transit as the top priorities of any sensible city hall, new ideas about cleaning up sewage almost never attract headlines or TV airtime. In its 90-year history, for instance, The New Yorker, the most urbane and expansive magazine in the country, has never published a feature article on sewage treatment.

As part of the Wilson Center and Circle of Blue’s Global Choke Point project, Choke Point: Port Cities will examine how Oakland, California, and Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, are responding to interlinked water, energy, and pollution challenges. These multimedia reports are meant to inform exchanges and convenings in 2016 to share among leaders of both cities and others like them around the Pacific Rim.

In March 1999, not long after he was sworn in as the 47th mayor of Oakland, Jerry Brown called Lesley Estes, the supervisor of the city’s watershed protection program. Brown, who is now California’s governor, wanted the city staffer he called “Creek Lady” to describe the most formidable ideas she had to conserve natural areas, make parks more beautiful, and clean up the city’s waters.

Before world oil prices collapsed late last year, shop owners closest to the banks of the Rio Grande River in Piedras Negras joked that they could hear the groans of Texas drilling rigs advancing toward their fast-growing northern Mexico city.

JOWAI, India – On April 17, in a ruling that stunned miners, truckers, and owners in this region of black dust and rivers that run the colors of the rainbow, India’s National Green Tribunal ordered the state of Meghalaya’s $650 million coal mining industry to shut down.

SHILLONG, India – India’s National Green Tribunal (NGT), a judicial body with legal authority that ranks just below the Supreme Court, is quickly emerging as one of the world’s most important forums for testing the idea that economic advancement is tightly wired to public safety and the security of water, air, and land.

NEW DELHI, India – There are nearly 1.3 billion people in this swarming democracy, where over 66 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the general election last May. A few of them took me aside this week to express surprise at the puzzle that is the American electorate and its national leadership.